RICHARD HARP is Charir of the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His most recent article was a discussion of the unpublished literary correspondence of Fr. Martin C. D’Arcy in the Times Literary Supplement of December 11, 2009.
Fy on Love without Money!
—John Wodroephe, The Spared
Hours of a Soldier, 1623
A perennial question for some persons of
every generation is: shall I marry for
love or for money? It is typical of the openminded
Shakespeare that he finds nothing
wrong with marrying for both. There is
in him no niggardly stinginess, no ghostly
idealism that fi nds something amiss with
combining the noblest spiritual ideal—
love—with the most fundamental material
reality—money. Without of course
wishing to challenge the general wisdom
of the Beatles’ classic formulation “I don’t
care too much for money, ’cause money
can’t buy me love,” there is more compatibility
between the two than is sometimes
acknowledged. The richest king in the Old
Testament, for example, Solomon, was also
the one who indulged the most his romantic
desires (albeit beyond all reasonable
boundaries) and to whom was traditionally
ascribed one of the world’s greatest love
poems, the Song of Songs. The Old Testament
patriarch Jacob, praised by the comic
villain Shylock in The Merchant of Venice
for his clever industriousness in multiplying
his financial gains when breeding his
father-in-law Laban’s sheep, was also the
most romantic of the patriarchs, working
for seven years to marry his heart’s desire,
Rachel, only to be tricked by Laban into
having to work still another seven years
to gain her hand—and doing this without
complaint. And even Shylock, who dreams
at night of moneybags, has a sentimental
side; when his friend Tubal tells him of the
rumor that his daughter Jessica had sold a
family ring “for a monkey,” the old moneylender
laments, “It was my turquoise; I
had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I
would not have given it for a wilderness of
monkeys” (3.1.90–92).
One stereotyped romantic plot familiar
to everyone has parents warning their
daughters against fortune hunters and
consequently insisting on arranging marriages
with young men of equal fortune
so that their social status and wealth will
be safeguarded. But great stories have
been written that also work against this
theme. Pride and Prejudice, for example, is
the famous account of a rich aristocrat, Mr.
Darcy, rejecting (after much soul searching
and self-infl icted distress) his peers’
expectations about whom he should marry
and choosing fi nally a spouse of modest
income. But the novel still makes clear the
compatibility of love and money; its heroine,
Elizabeth Bennet, without question
loves Darcy, but she also has no hesitation
in responding to her sister Jane’s question
about when she first started to love
the romantically-challenged gentleman by
saying, “I believe I must date it from my
first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley,”
1 Darcy’s grand country estate.
Love and money are both transforming
agents, able to change, like the magic of
the sea in The Tempest, otherwise pedestrian
realities into something “rich and
strange.” Ovid told such stories again and
again in his Metamorphoses (one of Shakespeare’s
favorite sources for his plays) when
the love of gods for mortals or of mortals
for each other causes one or the other to
change from a human being into a tree or
a bush or, somewhat more magnificently, a
constellation. Trees and bushes and stars are
not more precious, of course, than human
beings, but what gives them their worth
in Ovid’s eyes is their greater permanence
than transient human lives, which they
may eternally memorialize and celebrate.
Apollo’s love for the nymph Daphne, for
example, who was turned into a laurel tree
so that she would not have to succumb to
the great Roman god, was commemorated
whenever one of the god’s devotees, such
as victors at the ancient Pythian games,
wore a wreath made of leaves from that
tree. Or to take another example from the
same book, the mulberry bush was a timeless
reminder of the tragic unrequited love
of Pyramus and Thisbe, a story retold by
Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and also
alluded to extensively in his contemporaneous
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All
these stories are allegories of human love,
emphasizing the profound transformational
quality of desire. Perversions of love
deny change and metamorphosis; in lust
the dynamism of the person is paralyzed
and rendered immobile, as is seen in pornography
or in a false romantic idealism
where a woman is placed on a pedestal she
can never leave.
It is much the same with money. According
to the Biblical parable of the talents,
money is properly used when it is invested
and brings forth a good return, not when
it is hoarded or buried and kept back from
supporting good enterprises. In the parable
Jesus tells of the master who rewards
his two servants who double the money he
gives them but takes away the single talent
hoarded by a third servant who feared his
master’s wrath if he lost it in business. The
master gives that servant’s talent to one of
those who had made a profit. The moral
given by Jesus is, “For everyone who has
will be given more, till he has enough and
to spare; and everyone who has nothing
will forfeit even what he has” (Matthew
25:30). In these texts, so familiar to all
persons in Shakespeare’s time, money has
power to build up and transform society
for the common good, as love has power
to change the supple human form to something
more enduring. The perversion of
commerce and the pursuit of wealth in The
Merchant of Venice is usury, the exorbitant
charging of interest on transactions where
no new wealth is created. “For, if the merchant
may be allowed to make gain of his
money,” wrote Thomas Wilson in A Discourse
upon Usury in 1572, he will most certainly
do that rather than engage in more
risky but socially necessary commerce. As
a result, says Wilson,
The plough man will no more turn
up the ground for uncertain gain,
when he may make an assured profit
of his money that lies by him. The
artificer will leave his working.
The clothier will cease his making
of clothes, because these trades
are painful and chargeable [burdensome].
Yea, all men will give themselves
wholly to live an idle life by
their money [i.e., by lending their
capital], if they have any.2
In The Merchant of Venice love and desire
are everywhere in evidence, as are the
boundaries which seem to, but ultimately
do not, hold them in check. Antonio, the
play’s title character, is “sad” in its first
scene and literary critics have ever since
tried to discover why—because of concern
over some of his wealth being tied up
in cargo at risk on the high seas? Because
his good friend Bassanio wants to marry
the rich and witty Portia and so will not
hereafter be his close companion? Both
are quite possible but in fact Antonio, the
one who should know, says (in the play’s
very first line), “In sooth, I know not why
I am so sad” (1.1.1) and denies specifically
that affairs of business or the world have
made him melancholy: “I hold the world
but as the world / A stage where every
man must play a part, / And mine a sad
one” (1.1.77–79). This is common Shakespearean
wisdom: “all the world’s a stage”
says another temperamentally melancholy
character, Jacques, in As You Like It, “and
all the men and women merely players;/
they have their entrances and their exits”
(2.7.139–41). In addition, to be “sad” or
“melancholy” did not necessarily mean in
the late sixteenth century to be self-indulgently
gloomy and introspective; it could
also mean simply to be serious, a person of
gravitas, to use the Roman term, of weightiness
or intelligence.3 Antonio, then, may
be constitutionally melancholy, that is,
serious or sober; that he is not merely selfabsorbed
is evident when Bassanio enters
the stage in this same first scene and Antonio
inquires in a lively manner for news
about the object of Bassanio’s love, Portia,
and assures his friend that, if he needs
financial help in his romantic quest, the
merchant’s “extremest means / Lie all
unlocked to your occasions” (1.1.137–38).
Act 1.3 elaborates upon this theme of
love and money and their compatibility.
Shakespeare is considered by some critics
to be notable for his subtle thematic
ambiguities, but the vast majority of the
time he leaves us in little doubt about
what to think. Shylock’s first appearance
in the play, for example, is in this scene,
and it starkly reveals his character. When
Antonio enters the stage at 1.30, Shylock
is so disturbed that he must speak in an
aside, revealing his clear hatred of Antonio:
“How like a fawning publican he
looks! / I hate him for he is a Christian”
and because he “lends out money gratis
and brings down / The rate of usance here
with us in Venice” (11.31–32, 34–35). He
could hardly be much clearer: the whole
speech is an indication of his desire to
harm Antonio and the fact that they are
very nearly the first lines Shylock speaks
gives them additional weight. Such lines
of Shakespeare’s villains often ironically
reveal their characters. Iago’s first words
in Othello, for example, are a curse (1.1.4),
and those of Macbeth are, “So foul and fair
a day I have not seen” (1.3.38), an ironic
echo of what the witches have said in that
play’s first scene, “Fair is foul, and foul is
fair” (1.1.11).
It would be an inventive critic indeed,
then, who could find ambiguity in this
initial speech of Shylock. Shylock does
speak with unconscious irony, though,
when he compares Antonio to a “fawning
publican,” which to Shakespeare’s Christian
audience would be a clearly favorable
reference to the suppliant publican in St.
Luke’s Gospel (18:9–14) who humbly begs
for God’s forgiveness at the temple because
of the dishonesty he has practiced in his
profession; the self-righteous Pharisee,
praying beside him, piously claims that he
had no need of such forgiveness.
Shylock also misinterprets Jewish as well
as Christian Scripture. In this same scene
he distorts the story in Genesis of Jacob’s
breeding Laban’s rams and ewes as a justification of usury, leading Antonio to comment
that “the devil can cite Scripture for
his purpose,” a reference to Satan’s temptations
of Jesus in the wilderness. But along
with sacred texts Shylock is also twisting
basic human relationships. He pretends to
lend Antonio money as to a friend; Shylock
suggests that the pound of flesh that
he asks from the merchant as security for
the loan of 3,000 ducats to Bassanio is useless
to him and would not be collected; he
is, he avers, making a “kind” offer (1.133),
making a business deal a “merry sport”
(1.137), for “what should I gain / By the
exaction of the forfeiture?” (1.155–56).
The intentional ironies here are many.
Shylock is pretending to be “kind” in at
least two senses of that much played-upon
word in medieval and later literature. He
claims to be kind, that is, “generous,” in
making the bargain, but also at issue is the
idea that he is responding in a “natural”
way (as the Middle English word “kinde”
meant “nature”) to a fellow human being
in need, the same way that Antonio had
responded to Bassanio’s request for further
loans to support his expedition to Belmont.
As well as in etymology, important
background for this exchange between
Antonio and Shylock is found in the Old
Testament’s discussion of usury in Deuteronomy
23:19–20. There Moses instructs
the Israelites that they must not “lend
upon usury to thy brother” but that “unto
a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.”
There were Jewish writers in Shakespeare’s
age who argued that Jews and Christians
were in fact “brothers” who should not
practice usury toward one another.4 And
on the Christian side of the discussion St.
Thomas Aquinas, whose writings were still
greatly infl uential in the sixteenth century,
said that as Christians were brothers of all
men, the text in Deuteronomy therefore
prohibited practicing usury at all.5 So that
is perhaps what Antonio has in mind when
he says that he would have Shylock lend
him money as “to thine enemy” (1.130)—
he wants interest charged, as he does not
wish, contra St. Thomas, to be Shylock’s
“brother”—and why Shylock says—hypocritically—
that “I would be friends with
you” (1.134) and is willing therefore to
substitute the “merry bond” of the pound
of flesh rather than charging conventional
interest.6
Bassanio, not so caught up in his
romantic desires that he cannot see the
danger inherent in this sort of deal,
exclaims to Antonio, “You shall not seal
to such a bond for me! I’ll rather dwell
in my necessity” (146–47). But Antonio
shrugs off this objection, expressing his
confidence that he will easily be able to
repay the debt before it is due. It is possible,
I suppose, to see in Antonio’s abandoning
all business sense here, as well as
concern for personal security, his despair
in losing Bassanio’s affectionate companionship
because of his possible marriage to
Portia. His later plaintive confession, when
it looks as though Shylock will be able to
collect his bond, “I am a tainted wether
of the flock,/ Meetest for death” (4.1.114–
15), might support such a notion. But as
Shylock uses human virtues such as friendship
and generosity to disguise his hatred,
so Antonio subordinates here his business
acumen to the demands of friendship. As
one of the most perceptive commentators
on Shakespeare, W. H. Auden, has said,
Shylock’s “unlimited hatred is the negative
image of the infinite love of Venetian and
Belmont society, which proposes that one
should behave with a love that is infinitely
imprudent.” 7 Also resonant here is the
famous biblical text from St. John’s Gospel,
“Greater love hath no man than this, that
he lay down his life for his friends” (15:13).
Even though Antonio’s role in the play
diminishes after this first act, his unreserved
and risk-filled act of friendship
is the model for similar kinds of other
passionately virtuous acts, such as those
of Bassanio and Portia and Jessica, all of
whom, to different degrees (but none to
the extent of Antonio), are moved by love
to accept great risk in return for great
reward. Bassanio’s venture in love involves
a kind of gambling; in order to visit Portia
at her home in Belmont, he must first
receive a loan from Antonio for which he
has no collateral, being already in debt to
his friend for a previous loan. He must then
choose the casket that has the picture of
Portia in order to win her hand; if he does
not, he must 1) leave Portia’s home at Belmont
immediately, 2) tell no one which
casket he guessed, and 3) promise never to
marry. Bassanio seldom gets any credit for
his role as a suitor but in fact love requires
him to risk his livelihood and his freedom
ever to marry—everything, that is, short
of his life—in order to gain the beautiful,
intelligent and wealthy Portia in marriage.
Portia, in her turn, gives up a cherished
possession—her freedom to choose a husband—
in return for following the terms of
her father’s will that dictates that she can
marry only the person who chooses the
casket with her picture. For all the talk of
arranged marriages in this period, it was
nonetheless commonly acknowledged
that a woman did in fact have the right to
choose her spouse,8 and Portia is emphatic
that acceptance of her father’s will is also
her own choice. Although she initially
complains about its hard terms to her maid
Nerissa, she also says, “If I live to be as
old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana,
unless I be obtained by the manner of my
father’s will” (1.2.103–05). Nerissa’s support
for this resolve is telling: “Your father
was ever virtuous, and holy men at their
death have good inspirations,” and therefore,
Portia will undoubtedly “never be
chosen by any rightly, but one who you
shall rightly love” (1.2.27–28, 31–32).
This, too, is Portia’s own conviction, as she
tells Bassanio as he prepares to make his
choice: “If you do love me, you will find
me out” (3.2.41). That this is indeed what
happens results from Bassanio’s wisely
interpreting the riddle of the caskets. He
chooses the despised leaden one because
of its inscription, “Who chooseth me,
must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.16).
Where others had despised the leaden
box—the suitor from Morocco, for example,
had complained that “A golden mind
stoops not to shows of dross, / I’ll then nor
give nor hazard aught for lead” (2.7.20–
21)—Bassanio says that lead’s “paleness
moves me more than eloquence, / And
here choose I” (3.2.106–7). The appropriateness
of choosing lead was that love, be
it philia or eros, friendship or romantic love,
ought indeed to require the hazarding of
all one has, as both Antonio and Bassanio
demonstrate. The connection between
love and money here is not in the material
worth that each has but in the necessity of
“hazarding all one has” to gain their fruits.
Antonio’s wealth is important because he
can sacrifice it in friendship to Bassanio,
as Bassanio’s courtship is made virtuous
by his having to risk his freedom to marry
when he seeks Portia’s hand.
But success in love and business also
requires intelligence and wit—Portia calls
her previous suitors “deliberate fools!
When they do choose, / They have the
wisdom by their wit to lose” (2.9.80–81)
and it is to intelligence, reason, personified in Portia, that the last half of the play
turns. As love and money are no necessary
enemies, neither is reason and desire. The
golden mean, the famous term Aristotle
used to describe virtue, implies compromise
but it is a very different kind of
compromise than is usually practiced in
contemporary politics or society. In The
Merchant of Venice compromise (“How
many things by season seasoned are / To
their right praise and true perfection!” says
Portia [5.1.107–08]) is achieved, not by
political calculation or backroom deals but
rather by various persons’ passions having
their sway until reason discovers virtue’s
golden mean. Perhaps Portia could be seen
as a “deal maker'” when she comes to Venice
disguised as Balthazar to rescue Antonio
from his bond, but her aim is not to take a
little bit from each competing side for the
presumed good of the whole—the typical
political procedure—but rather to find a
way to give everyone what they want: to
Antonio his life, to her husband Bassanio
the friend who exposed that life to finance
the expedition to Belmont to win her
hand, to the Duke of Venice the integrity
of the city’s commercial reputation. Even
to Shylock she would have given a return
on investment that exceeded his wildest
dreams if he had let her. But Shylock was
not as interested in money as in revenge:
his abandonment of financial good sense in
favor of passion led to his ruin.
Portia’s name suggests her role in
the trial scene in Act 4: it is her duty to
“apportion,” to judge fairly what various
characters deserve. This role suits her
both because of her wisdom and status and
also because she was required to be passive
in the first half of the play because of
her father’s will. Now her role is changed
as she takes charge of the action, and her
self-control is evident. In her excitement
over Bassanio’s choosing the right casket,
she tells “love,” in an aside, to be “moderate,
allay thy extasy, / In measure rain thy
joy, scant this excess! I feel too much thy
blessing, make it less / For fear I surfeit”
(3.2.111–114). She also tells Bassanio that
they will say their wedding vows but postpone
the physical consummation of their
marriage until Antonio’s situation over
the bond with Shylock is resolved. Portia
shows here the spiritual basis of both
friendship and marriage: friendship is not
in the first place giving another his material
resources, as romantic love is not in the
first place the union of bodies.
Portia’s reason is most in evidence, of
course, in her famous speech about “the
quality of mercy.” As Antonio’s extreme
passion of love was shown in his friendship
for Bassanio, so is Shylock’s hatred in his
insistence on execution of his bond against
Antonio. He is offered double and even ten
times the 3,000 ducats that he is owed and
when he refuses these, Portia asks him if
he will not at least offer his victim a handkerchief
to stop the fl ow of blood (a clever,
ironic suggestion, as this of course is what
will ultimately invalidate Shylock’s bond:
in his cutting a pound of Antonio’s flesh
he cannot shed a drop of the merchant’s
blood); this, too, is refused. Shylock is now
making clear in public what had been obvious
from his first soliloquy: he hates Antonio
and wants his life. Portia’s speech, and
her subsequent insistence that Shylock must
observe the literal terms of his bond, is the
triumph of a reason eloquent in articulating
that in “the course of justice none of
us/ Should see salvation” (4.1.195–96).
Shylock of course has had his defenders
and the Venetian Christians their critics.
Many readers for at least two centuries
have seen something noble in Shylock
because of the contempt with which he
has been treated by those now seeking his
assistance. I cannot think for a moment
this was Shakespeare’s intention. There
are so many and such obvious ways that
the dramatist portrays Shylock as a villain;
to those already cited, we might add how
he is deserted by his daughter Jessica, a
sympathetic character, to marry Lorenzo,
Shylock’s comic juxtaposition of his frantic
concern for the wealth that his daughter
took from him and his indifference, to put
it mildly, to the loss of the daughter herself
(“I would my daughter were dead at my
foot, and the jewels in her ear: would she
were hears’d at my foot, and the ducats in
her coffin” [3.1.80–82]), the hypocrisy of
the bond he makes with Antonio, his contempt
for merriment and festivity—really,
almost everything Shylock does or says is
obviously and completely out of step with
the Shakespearean canons of comedy. The
prime example of those who see Shylock as
something more than a villain is the speech
in which Shylock defends his humanity by
saying “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a
Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions. . . .” and in which he
concludes:
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is
his humility? Revenge! If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example?—
why revenge! The villainy
you teach me I will execute, and it
shall go hard but I will better the
instruction. (3.1.52–65)
This is a powerful speech, but the way it
insists on all men’s common humanity is
only partial and ultimately reveals what’s
wrong with Shylock’s own view of humanity.
For everything that he cites as an example
of human nature—”if you prick us do
we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not
laugh? If you poison us do we not die?”—
has to do with the senses and the passions;
none of it concerns reason. Desire and passion
cut off from reason have become, in
the modern Western intellectual world, the
hallmark of human authenticity, so it is not
surprising that Shylock’s speech has won
admiration and cheers in the theatre and in
scholarly journals. Typical of the severing
of desire from reason in some intellectual
circles is this comment, found in an article
discussing The Merchant of Venice:
Desire is perilous because it annihilates
the speaking, knowing, mastering
subject, the choosing, commanding
self so precious to the Free West.
Lovers are conventionally speechless
(what can they say that would do justice
to desire?).9
Well, lots of things. Lovers are “conventionally
speechless”? In Shakespeare? The
plays, including The Merchant of Venice (for
example, Portia’s speech to Bassanio at
3.2.149 ff. after he chooses the correct casket),
are full of lovers finding innumerable
verbal outlets for their passion. Romeo and
Juliet are not exactly tongue-tied. Desire
finds its way to reason in the plays if it is
not perverted by a malicious will.
But it is also true, of course, that Shylock
has achieved a larger-than-life image
for some very good reasons. While stating
that it is his “stubborn villainy that generates
the uneasy tension that runs through
the drama,” R. V. Young also notes “there
can be no question that the Jew suffers ill
use at the hands of the Christians.”10 Shylock
does, for example, in his hard-headed
fury and outrage, point up the manifest
inadequacies of Venetian society—its use
of slavery, its Christian citizens who have
no interest in loving their enemy, its adherence
to a business code that would require
the execution of a manifestly inhuman
agreement in order to have its commercial
reputation upheld. And some of Shylock’s
anger can be justified as a response to the
contempt with which he is treated.
In listening to claims for Shylock’s virtue,
though, says A. D. Nuttall, we must
not forget “the real generosity, however
produced, of the Christians, the real ferocity,
however explained, of Shylock. They
did forgive Shylock. Shylock would have
torn open the breast of Antonio. These are
things which no theatrical experience of
the play will ever let you forget.”11 And
when Lorenzo tells Jessica, in one of the
play’s many beautiful speeches, that “The
man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is
not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils .
. . . / Let no such man be trusted (5.1.81–
83, 86),” the application to Shylock, who
hates all music and revelry, is obvious.
But in general, desire, when motivated
by what Hawthorne called the “sanctity of
the human heart,” is given free rein in the
play to indulge, variously, a businessman’s
generosity to his friend, a father’s control
of his daughter’s marriage, a suitor’s desire
to have one woman and no other, and even
a wife’s pleasure in watching her husband’s
struggling between the (apparently) conflicting demands, in the fifth act’s comedy
over the rings, of spouse and friend. And
reason, surprisingly but typically, vindicates
these extreme demands of the heart
in public and coherent ways in the play’s
double conclusions in Acts 4 and 5. As Pascal
said in his most famous pensée, “The
heart has reasons the reason knows not of.”
The title of this play has often been
thought odd. Antonio has little to do
after the first act except offer himself with
dignified charge to Shylock’s knife; why
should the play be named for him? But the
play is about taking risks, essential both to
business and to love. As Antonio is willing
to entrust his whole financial empire
on various enterprises at one time, so is he
willing to offer his life as collateral to further
Bassanio’s romantic desires. In both
love, friendship, and business, Antonio
offers all he has—as did the two prudent
servants in the parable of the talents—and
even puts himself under obligation to his
enemy as a condition for serving his friend.
For this no reward is promised him except
gratitude. Portia, too, willingly foregoes
her freedom in exchange for obeying her
father’s will, and Bassanio risks his ability
ever to marry by accepting the lottery of
the caskets. Unlike Antonio, though, both
Portia and Bassanio stand to gain great
reward for their bargains—each marrying
whom they love and, in the case of
Bassanio, receiving great wealth as well.
But it is Antonio, the merchant of Venice,
who sets the standard for risk-taking in
both business and love and who therefore
deserves to be the eponymous hero of the
play.
NOTES
- 3.17.290. London: T. Egerton, 1813.
- The Merchant
of Venice: Texts and Contexts, ed. M. Lindsay Kaplan
(Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 199–200. - See C. S.
Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1967), 75–85. - See the interesting
texts discussing this in Kaplan’s edition of the play,
217–20. - Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 78, reply obj. 2.
- At the time of the play’s performance, English law
permitted charging 10 percent interest on moneylending. - Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 81. - See,
for example, the remarks by Thomas Becon, The Catechism,
p. 322 in Kaplan’s text: ” . . . though the authority
of the parents be great over their children, yet in
the matter of marriage the consent of the children may
not be neglected.” - Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,”
in The Cambridge Shakespeare Library (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105. - See
his article in the March, 2004 issue of First Things. - A
New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1985] 2007),
131.
